The dragon’s hoard itself wasn’t nearly as valuable as the carcass of the dragon itself, at least from a goldweight standpoint. What was more precious was the lore the dragon had taken upon itself to ‘safeguard’, taking records, tablets, carvings, scrolls, and the like from various places across the world, and reserving them for itself and its kin.

I didn’t know the world well enough to return them to their true owners, although I was pretty sure I could spend magic to do so. As it was, much of the precious metal was only roughly worked, and the craftsmanship on the gems was definitely below par, too.

The archeologists were all tumbling over themselves to be the first to examine everything, but there was no way they could visit personally, so I would have to move everything out of here via Item or Tapestry, which was going to take me several trips at the least.

In the meantime, they were going to have to make do with examining and categorizing everything in my Visual File for nuggets of new stuff, one of my thoughtstreams that was totally detail-oriented jumping right into that job.

With the dragon dead, this cloud island was also going to start drifting, and the Aura of his presence would fade, meaning other things would be arriving to investigate and take over the lair that it represented, more than likely.

I also did not know how long it would be before his peers realized he was dead, likely via Messages that found no home or received no answer. They would then doubtless either Scry this place or come personally to investigate, so I didn’t actually have a lot of time.

His human Dragonbound would naturally know that their Patron was dead, and they were now receiving their power from the distant and disinterested draconic Ancestors behind him... very distant, indeed, with the Shroud up between them, relieving them immediately of the subconscious influence of the dragons.

I was going to be busy for a day or three. I had actually replaced the dragon’s Wards underneath its nose, making sure that it couldn’t flee by various magical means, so they’d endure long enough for me to empty this place.

If something decided to investigate that I didn’t want here, well, that was a matter of thirty seconds to get here and either chase it off, or appreciate the free Karma delivered my way...

----------------

It was one of the greatest, grandest, and bloodiest of achievements in human history.

In size, grandeur, and purpose, as well as the deaths involved in its construction, it had no true equal. Likewise, the time required to erect it all had crossed generations, consuming the lives of the people under the weight of stone and the power of muscle and sinew.

It was the Great Wall of China, and it was the longest and deadliest of Shroudzones native to the planet.

Emperor Qin Shi Huang had used building up the Great Wall as an excuse to get rid of anyone and everyone who crossed him and his totalitarian regime. Poets, nobles, commoners, magistrates, or bureaucrats, it didn’t matter. They were carted off to the Great Wall, made to labor in impossible conditions, and when they died they were buried without markers beneath the Wall itself.

No battle in human history had ever generated so many resentful dead, and as the Wall extended over mountains, plains, and hills, their silent hatred had flowed with it.

When the Shroud came, that hatred was unleashed.

Over the centuries since it was built, re-built, extended, joined, and then torn down in places by the opportunistic, parts of the Great Wall had found their way into many houses, roads, buildings, construction projects, and other places. After all, the Great Wall was in the way of expansion, and was largely a useless construction. Modern warfare could almost completely ignore it, while the handy pre-cut stone blocks were still useful in other places.

Ever pragmatic, the local Chinese had soon taken to stealing its stones to build things other than a great eyesore on the landscape, and over generations whole sections of the Great Wall had been retasked for other purposes.

Every single stone removed was a place the undead could manifest from, and since they tended to be places that people lived close to, the results were as might be expected.

Millions of Chinese had been slaughtered on the day of the Fall to the ancient dead who had died building the Wall, fighting atop it, or assaulting it. The next day, more Chinese died to at the claws of those who had perished the day before.

Those undead furiously dug out each and every stone of the Wall, regardless of where they were buried or what they were used in. Dams were breached, roads torn apart, bunkers ripped open, buildings toppled, plazas dug up, tombs broken, and the lands excavated haphazardly. The undead dug out the stones of the Wall, and they brought every single stone back to it, building it back up with literally magical speed as every stone found its old place, and new bones and blood joined that which had mortared the stones in ancient times.

The dead enslaved to the Wall exceeded a hundred million. They could move back and forth along the Wall itself with almost magical speed, meaning that any section of the Wall could effectively be reinforced by the dead from the whole length of it.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Fighting on any part of the Wall was equivalent to fighting all parts of the Wall.

What was worse, and had even scared the most confident of Cultivators away, was the Greyfield.

The Shroudzone of the Great Wall extended only a mile from the Wall itself, and its Deadzone a mile beyond that. But underneath that black cloud that snaked unmoving across the sky and over the horizon, there was a Greyfield.

No magic could be Cast there, and no chi or Qi powers could be wielded. There were no Forms or Techniques that could be executed there, and only passive Disciplines or Feats would have an effect.

The undead of the Great Wall didn’t have the might and powers of the Dark Bishops of the other Shroudzones, with their Negative Elemental energies and boosting of the undead, but they didn’t need it, because they stood there with none of our great magical powers able to attack them.

The Chinese fighting force was only getting bigger by the day. Volunteers of their own people and people coming from overseas had helped clear Shroudzone after Shroudzone. While there were Powered among them, the majority of them were taking Human Racial Class Levels.

They were building to Seven, becoming Forsaken, reclaiming some youth, largely getting incredibly tough, leaders igniting as Sources among them, and so far they’d even Awakened three Voids, one of them a Hyn.

Magical Weapons and Armor were not affected by the Shroudzone, along with other passive magical items, what few there were. Pointedly, neither Blessings nor Marks were affected.

The Fight with the Cultivators was where everyone Seven and up headed to... unless they were Forsaken and went beyond the Great Wall and up to Tibet, where the Void Brothers were pressing mercilessly into the Plateau there. Endless creatures from Dream and Nightmare seemed to block the way, and yet, the Forsaken seemed to be getting further and further, as vivus fed the Land, Forsaken solidified the Veil, and the warped area beyond was being forced back into Reality, acre by acre, square mile by square mile.

And making some damn strong Forsaken as it did, too!

The Forsaken rapidly maxed out the Slots on the Weapons and what Armor they had, since their stuff was generally in the 26 to 30 range, and could only hold three to five Slots. That meant that if they wanted better stuff, they had to improve it themselves, because there just weren’t enough smiths around who could do it for them.

Happily, the best smiths in the world were working with them, available in Marktell, and could guide them in the process. The most powerful among them could even work towards the lofty goal of QL 40, if they could get the right materials and earn the right. Briggs and Commander Haru’Ara wouldn’t even consider doing it for them if they weren’t a Ten.

As a result, there was a massive investment in smithing Skills among the men and women here, as well as Bowyer and Woodworking, and even Glassmaking to help with the Autobows that were the favorite Weapons of those hearing that eventually firearms would get extremely expensive and not work as they did now.

But, in the meantime, those Firearms were getting in a lot of work.

The undead on the Great Wall really had no answer to firearms’ superior range and hitting power. Laden with Banes and Vivic fire, helped by Tokens, volleys of gunfire from shooters with Abundant Ammunition, working from siege towers to give exposure to the top of the Great Wall and its many towers, mowed down many thousands of the Wall’s defenders remorselessly, concentrating on any archers among them, or those manning siege engines which could match their range.

Men from overseas with sniper rifles or shooting anti-material rounds were particularly useful in such endeavors, as blowing out simple shields used for cover was no problem for them, and arrow slits were just a convenient opening through a stone wall for the better shooters.

Contrary to what might be expected, Jiayu Pass ended up being the starting point for the liberation, and the destruction, of the Great Wall. That was largely because the fortification was visible in the distance from where the assault on the Tibetan Plateau was taking place, and so it served as a sort of bridge point for the men who reached Six to work on, as it was more difficult to assault than a normal Shroudzone.

Still, since they could start at an endpoint, it wasn’t as hard as it might have been. The biggest thing was that they had to destroy the Great Wall and vivisize every single stone as they went, or the undead would simply rebuild it.

Oddly enough, it was the Chinese who had the most zeal for this task. It was like the Great Wall was a barrier in their minds, connecting them to their pasts and looming over their future. The ancient beginnings of the Great Wall were a horror built on Imperial abuse by the government and ultra-conservative Confucian thinking, which had hampered and stayed with China for basically all of its thousands of years of history.

It was time to tear it all down. The gods were coming; Good and Evil DID exist, they weren’t just who benefited from what and the victor was saint while the loser was the villain; and rulership wasn’t about the biggest fist, but working with forces bigger and better than any one man to create a King of the Land and its people.

China was going to be entering a new age, and it was time for them to seize and mold it properly into something new, or to be bound and limited by their past, possibly forever.

The Cultivators were hideous examples of clinging to the glories of the Imperial past to most Chinese now, and examples of the old styles of clothing and attire basically meant you were a Cultivator wannabe at this point.

It was Briggs who pointed out to them all that while they had to get rid of their past, they also had to seize the future, creating a new way for the Chinese that was not just that of the West and localized. As a result, there was not so strangely a very somber tone around the new styles being adopted by the Chinese.

Anything Cultivators had insisted on was absolutely abhorred, basically seen as slave styles regardless of how elegant it was, no different from dressing a flesh puppet. It was true, too... anytime I saw a red scarlet phoenix dress, I instantly tensed up and got ready to fight, as did literally millions of Chinese. It went without saying that pale skin was basically revolting to many. Amusingly enough, freckles, which were just about as anti-Cultivator as could be, were very much in vogue.

Designers among the Purgers could and did talk, comment on designs, show favorites, and grimly deny sorts of patterns that stirred up unpleasant memories. Industry wasn’t what it was, but magic helped, and making cloth wasn’t all that hard. New traditions and a new national identity wouldn’t be born overnight, but the Chinese were Leveling as hard as any population in the whole world, maybe more.

They were definitely going to be a big influence in the new world, one way or another.